Business vs Technical Proposition for IT Outsourcing

Most offshore-based IT outsourcing companies still look at selling to prospects on the basis of the superiority of their technical proposition. They go at lengths to come out with technical data, analysis, process models etc. All this to prove that they have a better story than competition which is now not necessarily another offshored-based IT outsourcing company. ( It mostly used to be then but now as they look at playing in the turfs of the big boys, this is not always true). So they go to all lengths to woo the CIO and his team and convince them how they are superior technically.

What they miss out is to woo the CFO and sell on the basis of the larger compelling case - the business case. The big boys of the game (IBM, EDS, CSC etc.) have been playing golf and wooing the CFO along with the CIO. The truth is that most often having a strong technical solution (not necessarily the best but even if it is one of the better ones) is a qualifier than being a clincher.

Isn't it so true - "The business of business is business" and so till there is an appealing business case, the CIO may not have the last say.

Reminds me of the sales mantra which I learnt early in my career : Sell to the M-A-N in the account:

M: Money (the person who controls finance)

A: Authority (the person who has the authority to decide/influence the sales)

N: Need (the person in the prospect organization)

The CIO mostly is the "N" while the CFO is the "M". Both or some others will have the "A".

As India based(offshore-based) IT outsourcing companies look at playing larger deals, they need to recognize this and not miss the CFO who may be the reason for those deals that unknowingly swung off while they had best technical solution.

Opex Only IT

With cloud, SaaS catching up, IT's capex is bound to shrink. With the utility metered model, and with enterprises buying data center services rather than data center, IT expenditure will move to very high Opex and a very low with not nil Capex.

This is what would get CFOs interested into this phenomenon. It will make it easy for businesses to be more flexible and agile. It would be easy to predict expenses and pay higher when you need more (say quarter ends and holiday sale etc.) and not pay for excess capacity when you don't need it. The cloud provider will be able to even out usage spurts across customers and give that advantage.

The only enterprises which will be having high capex will be cloud providers who will finally be the only one buying infrastructure to build and maintain capacities.

IT Enterprise 2.0

I mentioned the following in my previous post :

"In its ultimate and extreme form which may take many years to materialize hardware will finally be bought and managed by large service providers. Most enterprises will then have a link to the cloud. Think of it like the electricity supply to consumers and businesses. Now we don't need to have generators to produce our electricity but rather depend on a central agency which generates electricity. Replace electricity with computing and storage and you see how these service providers will build and sell computing services. Thus the complexity is pushed to the periphery or the user is distanced from the core."

Data Centers will move to the periphery or away from the enterprises to service providers. As that happens all that goes into the data centers (computing infra, storage infra, systems administration, system management et al). So what will IT Managers do? What would be in the realm of the CIO and the IT Managers once the cloud becomes staple (and stable)?

The focus will then shift on those that are relevant to the enterprise users and not handled by the cloud. All that relates to cloud's performance will be factored in the QoS SLA of the cloud. Here are things that IT departments will then be working on:

• Focus on applications, their relevance, efficiency and architecture
• Performance of infrastructure that links to the cloud. The network elements linking to the cloud will ultimately decide the quality of service that would be realized
• Focus on end user experience of applications. This is something which seems to be long missing out its rightful share.
• Enterprise management will be reduced to managing performance of network elements which in all likelyhood will be outsourced to the network provider. Centerstage will be Business Service Management where the ultimate impact and performance at the business performance level will manage. The market for bulky enterprise management tools will suddenly shrink to the cloud providers who will be servicing hundreds and thousands of customers